Madame Butterfly
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Posts posted by Madame Butterfly
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No new shuttle flights until March, NASA says
Delay driven by fuel tank problems, desire to shift which shuttle goes when
Peter Cosgrove / AP
MSNBC
Updated: 1:10 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2005
NASA announced Thursday that it was delaying the next shuttle launch until at least March 2006, as the space agency continues to work on problems with the external fuel tank. As reported by NBC News on Wednesday, NASA has also decided that the next mission will be flown by Discovery, instead of the originally planned Atlantis.
"March 4th is the timeframe we're looking at," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, but added that engineers and other agency workers had to take a hard look at the schedule and it would be about two weeks before an official date was set.
Just after Discovery's landing last week, Gerstenmaier said the previous schedule, which called for an Atlantis launch in September, was virtually impossible to meet due to the additional engineering changes that would be required. There had been talk of a November opportunity, but NASA decided to pass up that brief launch window as well as a possible one in January.
The key sticking point has to do with the shuttle's external fuel tank: NASA mission managers and even Discovery's astronauts were surprised to see a large piece of the tank's foam insulation breaking off after the July 26 launch, even though engineers had spent two years trying to reduce the risk of foam debris.
Gerstenmaier said the foam investigation was making "very good progress," but that it was still unclear exactly what had gone wrong.
In addition to the foam repairs, NASA said the delay would allow it to shift the shuttle order around so that Atlantis would not be forced to make two missions in a row, with a quick turnaround. Now that there's a seven-month delay, Discovery will take on STS-121, the next scheduled mission, and Atlantis will take the one after that, STS-115, currently set for May 2006.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said he did not think the delays would greatly impact the five-year plan to finish building the international space station and then retire the shuttle. "We need to view shuttle missions as a process," he said, instead of focusing on individual missions in isolation.
First flight since Columbia
Discovery's just-concluded mission, STS-114, marked the first shuttle flight since the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew in February 2003. The mission's twin goals were to resupply the international space station and to test the upgraded safety procedures that were put into place after the Columbia tragedy.
Dozens of cameras monitored Discovery's ascent. In fact, it was a new camera mounted on the fuel tank that caught the crucial view of the foam breaking away from a part of the tank known as the protuberance air load ramp, or PAL ramp.
Although the flying foam caused no damage to the orbiter, the incident led NASA to suspend future shuttle flights until the problem was fixed. Mission planners also decided to transfer more supplies to the space station to help the outpost's two-man crew weather a reduced resupply schedule. The space station should have sufficient supplies despite the new shuttle delay, thanks to Discovery's delivery as well as additional cargo slated to arrive on unmanned Russian spacecraft.
Discovery itself remains in California, where it landed last week because of weather concerns at Cape Canaveral. The shuttle now must be mounted atop a modified Boeing 747 jet for a piggyback flight back to Florida — but the operation has been held up, first by weather, then by a mechanical snag. NASA reported Wednesday that workers had a hard time aligning the shuttle's protective tail cone for the trip. As a result, the scheduled two-day journey is due to begin no earlier than Friday.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive
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Eating a homemade "scrambler"
Looking at the huge pile of laundry in front of me to be folded and wishing I had live in help
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It was meant to be!!! 
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Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I think some of you don't realize that
"He's just not that into you if............."
was a huge bestseller written by some of the people involved with Sex and The City.
A mans advice to woman about what all those things you tell us, and what's really behind them.
I started this thread after reading alot of PL's that discussed confusion in relationships in hopes of maybe having some candid comments from each sex, or perhaps some questions to be asked back and forth.
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Here's link to a thread we were using the other day Data.
http://www.startrekfans.net/index.php?show...+law+brad++pitt
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Hef's into everyone, literally,
so you don't expect him to be wanting to have a relationship with you.Besides, the blonde bimbo brigade with plastic inserts don't have any higher expectation than to have their 15 minutes.
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Replying to He's Just Not That Into You If.........He doesn't make the time to call you or to be with you
If he his word means nothing
If he says he'll do something, and then he backs out without a good reason.
If your body "vibes" give you a bad feeling when you're talking to him. Your body doesn't lie, your mind can.
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To really love a woman
To understand her
You gotta know her deep inside
Hear every thought
See every dream
And give her wings when she wants to fly
And when you find yourself
Lying helpless in her arms
You know you really love a woman
When you love a woman
You tell her that she’s really wanted
When you love a woman
You tell her that she’s the one
She needs somebody
To tell her that it’s gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
Really really ever loved a woman
To really love a woman
Let her hold you
Do you know how she needs to be touched ?
You gotta breath her
Really taste her
To you can feel her in your blood
Then when you can see your unborn children in her eyes
You know you really love a woman
When you love a woman
You tell her that she’s really wanted
When you love a woman
You tell her that she’s the one
She needs somebody
To tell her that you’ll always be together
So tell me have you ever really
Really really ever loved a woman
You got to give her some faith
Hold her tight
A little tenderness
You gotta treat her right
She’ll be there for you
Taking good care of you
You really gotta love your woman
And when you find yourself
Lying helpless in her arms
You know you really love a woman
When you love a woman
You tell her that she’s really wanted
When you love a woman
You tell her that she’s the one
She needs somebody
To tell her that it’s gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
Really really ever loved a woman
Just tell me have you ever really
Really really ever loved a woman
Just tell me have you ever really
Really really ever loved a woman.
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Listening to the radio (Rain by Madonna is playing)
Trying to work something out with someone I care about greatly.
Keeping an eye on the severe weather alerts that seem to be heading my way.
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Agreed completely. If someone doesn't like you for who you are, they're not "the one." Why stay with someone who isn't right for you. Keep looking! And iyou're not happy with yourself, how could you ever be happy with someone else?Well, I what I was trying to get people to talk about were other things really.
Obviously if someone is mean to you or your friends, you shouldn't be with them.
But what about those more subtle things that happen in a relationship?
I think everyone is thinking to broadly
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Enigmatic Khipu
First Inca Word Emerges
By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News
Aug. 16, 2005— Puruchuco — the name of a city near modern Lima, Peru — could be the first intelligible word to be heard from the vanished Inca civilization, according to a study published in the current issue of Science.
The site of an Inca palace, the word Puruchuco would have appeared in the form of a characteristic series of three figure-of-eight knots at the start of several khipu.
Khipu are mysterious assemblages of colored knotted strings that have been found at various Inca sites.
Located in the Andean highlands of Chile and Colombia around 1200 A.D., the Inca ruled the largest empire on Earth by the time their last emperor, Atahualpa, was garroted by Spanish conquistadors in 1533.
Scientists to Study Ancient American
The advanced civilization left no written language, but it did leave hundreds of enigmatic khipu, decorative objects consisting of one main cord to which several pendant strings are attached. These strings can carry offshoot strings, and they bear clusters of knots.
In 1923, science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the khipu were more than decorative; they were a sort of textile abacus, their knots used to record calculations.
But Locke's rules decoded only a small percentage of the existing 700 khipu that survived the Spanish destruction, failing to take into account even one-half of the total information encoded in them.
Anthropologist Gary Urton and mathematician Carrie Brezine at Harvard University have partly unravelled the knotty code by extracting the first Inca word and deciphering the math from a series of khipus.
The knotty devices were used as ledger books in a sophisticated accounting system "in which census and tribute data were synthesized, manipulated, and transferred between different accounting levels in the Inca administrative system," said the researchers.
Urton and Brezine used a computer database packed with any possible data on nearly half of the 700 known khipu to analyze 21 khipu recovered all together in 1956 near a palace at the Inca administrative center of Puruchuco.
The computer data showed that seven of the 21 khipu were numerically related, uncovering the first mathematical bond between khipu.
Basically, the summed values of all strings of the same color of one khipu matched the sums on the corresponding strings of another khipu, and so on.
According to Urton, such compilation is consistent with the Inca state's enormous labor hierarchy, wherein groups of 10, 50, 100, 500 and more laborers nestled into increasingly large administrative units.
"Tribute in the Inca state was levied in the form of a labor tax. Each taxpayer was required to work a specified number of days each year on state projects... .," Urton said.
"Instructions of higher-level officials for lower-level ones would have moved, via khipu, from the top of the hierarchy down. This information would have been partitive in nature, with assignments made to groups of 1,000 workers broken down into two groups of 500, and so on.
"In the reverse direction, local accountants would forward information on accomplished tasks upward through the hierarchy, with information at each successive level representing the summation of accounts from the levels below," said Urton.
Moreover, all 21 khipu featured an "arrangement of three figure-eight knots at the start of the khipu," which the researchers believe represented "the place identifier, or toponym, Puruchuco."
"We suggest that any khipu moving within the state administrative system bearing an initial arrangement of three figure-eight knots would have been immediately recognizable to Inca administrators as an account pertaining to the palace of Puruchuco," Urton said.
Called "terrific, careful and great" by textile archaeologist Bill Conklin of the Textile Museum in Washington D.C., the research could pave the way to the first inventory of place names on khipu.
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Well it just says 2006 on the official site, where did you see April of 06?
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You just never know.
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I know, I think this is a very stupid train of thought.
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Elephants, lions to roam North America again?
Plan to reintroduce large mammals, ecological history parks
By Robert Roy Britt
Managing editor
Updated: 2:00 p.m. ET Aug. 17, 2005
Cheetahs, lions, camels and elephants would roam wild in the United States under a new proposal to re-introduce large animals similar to those that humans hunted to extinction long ago.
The U.S. Ecological History Park, as it is billed by scientists, would help preserve species that are under increasing pressure for survival in Africa. It would also re-create a more balanced predator-prey relationship in the Great Plains and Southwest, an ecological diversity that has been absent for more than 10,000 years thanks at least in part to hunting pressure.
The idea, similar to one already under way in Siberia, is laid out in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by a dozen ecologists and conservationists at 10 universities and institutions.
The park, where large and sometimes dangerous predators would roam free, could be an economic boon to depressed farming regions that humans are fleeing from anyway.
The scientists would like to start now, using large tracts of private land, and expand the effort through the century.
"If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts," admits Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University. "But if people hear the one-hour version, they realize they haven't thought about this as much as we have. Right now, we are investing all of our megafauna hopes on one continent — Africa."
Better than rats
One justification for "rewilding," as the scientists call it, is that one way or another, we humans have a dramatic effect on the animal kingdom and ecology in general, so a proactive approach is better than letting the world go to the dogs. Or, in this case, to the rats.
In the absence of elephants and large predators, which together stomp the ground and keep other animals on the run, landscapes will come to be dominated by dandelions, rats and other undesirables, the scientists write.
Large predators can be "keystone species" that are crucial to shaping the flora and fauna of an entire range.
A modern example is the widespread disappearance of wolves and grizzly bears in parts of the West, again at the hands of humans. Elk populations soared. Elk eat willows, which beavers rely on, and so beaver populations in Colorado declined by up to 90 percent, the authors state. Fewer beavers meant fewer dams, and the reduced wetlands caused willow populations to decline 60 percent in some areas.
The paper’s lead author is Cornell graduate student Josh Donlan.
"Humans will continue to change ecosystems, cause extinctions, and affect the very future of evolution -- either by default or design," Donlan told LiveScience. "The default scenario will surely include ever more pests and weed-dominated landscapes and the extinction of most large vertebrates."
Cheetahs, woolly mammoths and relatives of the camel were just a few of the large mammals that roamed America during the Pleistocene era, which ended 10,000 years ago as the last Ice Age retreated. Studies have shown that their demise was due largely to hunting by humans, not from climate change, as one theory held.
Their absence has altered the biodiversity of the continent and potentially the evolution of other animals. Large prey such the antelopelike pronghorn of the Southwest evolved lightning speed over millions of years to escape cheetahs, for example.
Start now
The park would actually involve multiple locations and phases of introduction, beginning immediately.
One first step would be to import endangered camels from the Gobi desert to the American Southwest, where they might gobble woody plants that now rule some landscapes.
Small numbers of African cheetahs and elephants from Asia and Africa could immediately be introduced on private property in the United States. The endangered cheetahs are close relatives to cats that roamed prehistoric America. Elephants are related to mammoths.
The elephants could bring economic benefit by their natural ability to manage grasslands and the potential for ecotourism, the scientists say.
Financial benefit is a key to the whole plan, in fact. The researchers cite the more than 1.5 million annual visitors to the semi-wild San Diego Zoo as an example of the draw that might be expected in a Pleistocene Park.
The scientists realize they have an uphill battle to gain public support. The controversy surrounding the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park shows the "clear obstacles" faced by any rewilding effort, Donlan said.
"Obviously, gaining public acceptance is going to be a huge issue, especially when you talk about reintroducing predators," Donlan said. "There are going to have to be some major attitude shifts. That includes realizing predation is a natural role, and that people are going to have to take precautions."
© 2005 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
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How To Expand Love by the Dalai Lama
Who's Who in Egytpian Mythology
Sarah by Marek Halter
This is a fast read and I very much enjoyed it. Based on the character in the old testiment, I read this book last night in 2 hours. Kind of haunting me throughout the day, thinking of the core lessons from it.
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Talking on the phone
Chatting online with a friend about her resume'
drinking some ice water
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So what do women consider selfish, and what do guys consider normal?
Is it just a gender gap, or is it perception.
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It seems we all have seen posts on this site where people are pondering relationships.
And as we are truly different species from men and we from then, I thought posting the different chapter names, and having people comment on them, and perhaps further discussions may be beneficial to understand the opposite sex.
So guys, if you have something positive to contribute, we'd appreciate your help.
**some mature themes listed in book as topics**
He's just not that into you if .....................................
~If he's not asking you out
~If he's not calling you
~If he's not dating you
~If he's not having sex with you
~If he's having sex with someone else
~If he only wants to see you when he's drunk
~If he doesn't want to marry you
~If he's breaking up with you
~If he's disappeared on you
~If he's married (and other insane variations of being unavailable
~If he's a selfish jerk, a bully, or a really big freak
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Yeah, the Cubs do suck, but there's something more in being a fan for them than the Sox.
Your team for College ball?
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Listening to the cicadas
giving up on the mail system here, I suppose the universe is just telling it's not worth my effort.
Discussing something with a friend online.
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No, I prefer college football. But the Bears will still always suck.
Music
in The Cotton Candy Factory
Posted
Siouxsie and the Banshees
"Kiss Them For Me"
Am dancing to it too.
